Why not "backupandrecoverywhateveryouwant.dell.com" as the business-critical bit of it (hard-coded into software, etc.) and then if you REALLY need to, make
www.ridiculousdomainnamehere.com just resolve to that subdomain.
Then nobody is going to let dell.com expire (you would hope), if they do, the service will still work as expected and not be subject to compromise, and worse that happens if you have to tell customers to update their bookmarks if there was some user-focused web element on that domain (but, hey, without the secured login to the dell.com subdomain, it wouldn't matter right?).
Like the "Prince of Persia" code release, I'm not at all sure of the point of a release of assembler-heavy code.
Pretty much, you could get that from a disassembler just run on the same programs if you desperately needed to know what it did. Sure, legality and all, but is anyone really watching out for people reverse-engineering 20-year-old OS?
As someone who was familiar with 8086 asm and things like Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, I have written any number of things using exactly this kind of code. And I couldn't even be bothered to pick through the logic of even a single file out of interest.
Nice being GPL and all but are we going to see OpenMOS? I doubt it very much. It's like someone telling you a 100 year old recipe for bread. All very nice and all, but I bet it just tastes like shit and uses ingredients you can't get / don't want to use any more.
If you honestly think that game "AI" is anywhere near the capabilities to operate in the real world, you're sadly mistaken. It literally does not act on a single sensor of input, input is handed to it. And even then I can recall many instances where game "AI" fucks up and can't do the simplest of things.
If you want to have the cars driving around a set loop of routes, highly specified, not able to deviate only choose at junctions, with zero unexpected obstacles - that's called a railway.
I'd be right behind an electric railway to every city with rentable places on the cars. We have it. Expanding it to every road is RIDICULOUSLY expensive.
But I'd rather train-then-walk than touch an self-driving car, and I'm someone who literally does everything they can to avoid having to take a train or bus.
This is all still the realms of hyperbole, and still doesn't resolve the fundamental incompatibility: Code which you can predict and certify to the point that you can guarantee people's lives, and code which tries to write itself or is "trained" by humans with no clue how it actually makes the decisions it does.
There is STILL no such thing as "AI", or even proper machine "learning". It's statistical-analysis-by-given-input or complete bollocks.
And it would be infinitely cheaper, easier and safer to just put a rail down one lane of every road and call it a tram.
There's a big difference to saying "it can't be done" and saying "it's not at all practical/profitable to do".
So far, I don't think anything he's said can't be done. He breaks no laws of physics that I'm aware of.
But the expense to do so, and the advantages of doing do given back, don't match AT ALL. Batteries, electric cars, rockets, fancy trains - he can throw money at anything, of course. And you'll meet a modicum of success, of course. So long as you don't count "viable business model" under the criteria for success.
Tesla don't make profit. The batteries are industry standard designs that they tell us "will be cheaper in bulk". The rockets are basically a way to throw money away so far (but of course people will use them to launch their insured satellites, because you're the one losing money, they're just getting a cheap launch), and the trains thing - miles of tunnel sustaining vacuum indefinitely? Yeah, that stuff just happens and can be funded by a bit extra on a train ticket that consumers would pay to save a bit of time, of course it can..... Hey, have you met my friend Concorde?
People in the media aren't experts. If they were experts, they'd be working in those businesses. The experts, those working at places like NASA and Ford and similar competing companies... they're using Musk as a research guineau pig while they sit on 100 times the investment he could ever secure. They let him throw his money away on what doesn't work / isn't popular, and if he hits on anything they can take him out of the market in days. They don't often talk about him because they're quite happy to see him throw his money away on things that they probably would never bother to invest in.
But the second he's more than a celebrity throwing money into a large industrial-size bin, they can swoop and take his business in no time. Fact is, they're not, and they're not even bothering to compete, not because they can't but because there's little point. Tesla sell a pittance of cars compared to any car manufacturer you can name. Their rockets aren't stealing money from NASA, they're actually funding it. The trains thing is pure hyperbole at the moment and if people want faster trains, there's much more affordable middle-ground anywhere they want it. And the battery thing? It has no legs. It's literally "let's do what everyone else does, in bulk!". Except there are a number of companies already doing exactly that and Musk doesn't even have a factory for his yet.
The man is money and hyperbole. Nobody competing is going to bad-mouth him while that's true because the worst possible situation is: he does something interesting that captures the public's spending, and then they copy 100 times over. But all other situations are: he spends lots of money to make much less money, and all his claims end up never coming to fruition.
1) Who sets a sleep timer on something like that? 2) Who falls asleep with any music they can hear still playing? 3) Who feels they need to have the thing turn-off if they can sleep through it? 4) Who thinks a timer plug on the power would be quicker and easier? 5) Who thinks it's "fun" to have to hack on basic functionality to a device that obviously already detects the command necessary to activate it and contains technology sufficient to perform it but the tech makers just don't care enough to bother.
I have a pack of AA 2800mAH rechargeable batteries at home that can give me something quite similar.
I bought them for my GP2X back in.... hold on... 2008, according to my emails from the person I bought it from. They will happily fry themselves if you short-circuit them, the current available is unbelievable.
They could fast-charge in a little over an hour, I think, but I never bought ridiculous chargers, I just bought more of those batteries. I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30 minutes back then too.
The charge time is about the only part I'm absolutely GUESSING on. The rest is something I could show you, and dig out the purchase emails for, with dates.
Sure, they may have got a tiny bit cheaper, and a tiny bit slimmer (but my currently mobile phone battery is at least the size of a single AA battery, and only 2.1Ah). But in the last ten years, the technology, capacity, size and charge times have barely changed.
Ten years is a long time in computing. In anything, we now enjoy the benefits of lower-powered computers (my GP2X needed 2 x high capacity AA's to run an ARM 200MHz), not better batteries.
To be honest... unless you're actually a scientist with access to a lab to create this stuff... it still "doesn't matter" until they are in shops, available to buy, just like everything else.
Until then, it's quite literally a science experiment.
It's like telling me that we have fusion-reactors. That's great. Cool science. The scientist in me loves the idea. But until someone actually BUYS ONE and puts it into the real world, it's entirely and literally academic. It doesn't affect my life, or almost anyone else's whatsoever.
You have to be a futures trader, or a research scientist for this kind of article to have any impact on you that wouldn't already happen if they just kept quiet and then brought out a product with it in.
So you're saying they're all show? I absolutely agree. That's the selling point?
"I don't want a car that looks like it'll crumple like a tin can in a wreck."
Right up until the day you understand physics, crumple-zones, NCAP safety tests, and the reason so many more people survive crashes nowadays.
"If "designer" status means that I get a luxury sedan that looks like a luxury sedan, I'll buy all day long."
Yep. Looks.
Believe it or not, most people DON'T buy a car based on looks, or we'd all have those ridiculous "sporty" things which are incredibly impractical and you can barely get into. I want a car that I can put the shopping in the back, five people in the seats, and still be able to park it easily without the thing costing the end of the Earth to buy or run.
Humans often assume an approximately 28-hour cycle if removed from all natural stimuli.
Personally, I wake when I want and sleep when I'm tired, modulo work. That often means staying up all night only to go back to work, and then sleeping longer the next night etc. I don't see any reason to be bound to a particular timetable. If I didn't need to go to work, I would literally be completely unpredictable and live as much during the night as during the day.
To be honest, in the modern era is jet-lag even a thing? It's a disconnect between "visible daylight" and "time spent awake", and let's be honest - we're living more into the night now than we ever have in all of human history.
I don't know of anyone who suffers serious jetlag, because most of the ones who travel far are night-owls and easy-sleepers. I think that's got ten times more to do with things than anything you could take in pill-form or similar.
Myself, when I get off a plane, I'm just glad to be off it as I see the whole waiting/security/waiting/flying/more waiting/more security thing as an completely unnecessary chore. I'm usually bouncing out of the airport and barely sleep the first night (whenever that happens to be) because I'm just glad to be doing things.
Do you sleep on flights? Do you often sleep during the day? Can you stay up through the entire night without getting tired until the night after? Though I'm sure they are all linked to your body clock, you can pretty much train your body to anything, and I'm damn sure I've trained my body to totally ignore whether it's sunny out or not in order to sleep through the day and work through the night when required. And literally never had jetlag, even on trans-Atlantic flights.
Tesla make grandiose claims while trying to compete against huge, billion-dollar organisations that have been doing this for - in some cases - over 100 years, by throwing money at some things that have never been problems (e.g. actually making electric cars - the UK has had milk-floats, etc. since the 1960's and before, and essentially the underlying tech has "evolved" only by the components becoming available all the time before anyone thought of calling things electric cars, i.e. more efficient and larger motors), throwing money at things that are complete barriers to entry for models of car to the industry (batteries), throwing money at "innovations" that are nowhere near ready for production usage and basically can't even take responsibility for their own actions yet (self-driving nonsense), producing industry-standard, no-different, not-even-a-patent batteries in standard-size modules using standard techniques, and then thinking that just throwing things into the car suddenly makes it attractive to buyers as anything other than a status symbol.
It's literally like a child became a billionaire, said "I want electric cars" and then spends the next ten years throwing money at things that either already were, or that can't be without some innovation and people know it. Literally, name an INNOVATION on the part of Tesla. Something they invented. It's like someone went into a store, bought everything they found on the shelves, shoved it together and then claimed to be "innovative".
And they sell an ABSOLUTE PITTANCE of cars (and now even less than that!). They just make a lot of fuss about doing so. Any of the big names could buy them out in seconds, or buy up their components, or put out a competing model that would sell more just by having the big-name on it. If people actually wanted electric cars (they don't really, because of above problems).
About their only success or innovation is marketing, that's about it. Literally selling things that exist on the market already cobbled together. Their the market guinea pig. The big-names and letting them waste their money, while looking for the one decent breakthrough in their MASSIVE R&D labs that have 10 times as much money as Tesla ever had as a company.
Motor companies have always had electric concept cars (I would argue that hybrids are rest of the motor industry's innovation, nothing to do with Tesla - a middle ground more acceptable to the consumer which sell much better. Hybrids represent 3% of the market, electrics so much less than 1% that it's too hard to account for). Just nobody was ever really willing to buy them, so why would you bring them to market - the R&D was done, yes, but to ramp up to production is expensive and they'd never have been profitable, as Tesla are finding out now (have they ever made a penny in profit?). The same problem happened with the Tesla, really, except they sell on their "designer" status only, and not very well at all.
Any fool can throw money at a venture and claim success by selling a handful of vehicles at zero or negative profit. Hell, give me a few billion and I'll put a rocket on the Moon too. Problem is, it's not sustainable, sensible, doing anything for innovation, or actually driving anything at all..
Are you seriously suggesting the TfL, the people IN CHARGE OF THE TUBE NETWORK, can't come up with a number for how busy stations are at certain times of the day, but think that Wifi numbers (which by far do not represent actual passenger numbers) will help them do that?
Really? I mean, I knew they were incompetent, but that would just be staggering.
The control rooms can see cameras of almost every platform on almost every Tube station. They show it off when they do those documentaries where they cry about how little their drivers earn compared to millionaires and Premier League football players.
If you NEED to know the exact route every person took, to that level of detail, to know that Willesden Junction gets busy, then you really shouldn't be running a transport network. And, guess what. Those "bad connections"... yeah, that's when the train runs late which shows up on a big electronic sign on every station on the route. Gosh, I wonder how they could obtain that information....
Please explain why US Navy warhsips have crews who "lack basic seamanship certification".
I mean.. I understand that they might not have the piece of paper, the same way they might not have passed the official driving test to drive a tank, but surely... surely at some point... someone gave them the equivalent skills and/or sent them on the same kinds of training such that it would be a cinch to acquire such certification?
Good luck. I've looked for a "real news" site for years that actually lets you filter this kind of thing out.
If I want news, I go on a news site. If I want tech news, I go on a tech news site.
Unfortunately, "number of eyeballs" always wins and they all creep into current affairs, actions of presidents of countries that I have little interest in, and terrorist attacks etc. as well as the soapboxing of any vaguely relevant celebrity (Musk, etc.).
Personally, I want a news search engine that lets me filter:
-terrorism -ISIS -Trump -Brexit -Musk......
All the ones I see end up with either junk creeping through or such sparse pages after you do that that it's just not worth it.
Like the TV show The Newsroom: I'd really like it to exist in real life, a channel that only reports REAL NEWS and not the tripe, but while "what's popular" dictates revenue, you don't stand a chance.
Pretty much if you're on a train (especially a Tube train) then you bought a ticket from A to B or - in London - you bought an Oyster card which records your every journey as you have to tap-in and tap-out.
This is quite normal for any train/subway system. What information do you think they are going to glean from Wifi that they can't glean in this manner about travel patterns? Only what you give them, and only of little use (does it REALLY matter that the guy going from Embankment to Mile End did a DNS lookup for slashdot.org, and how on earth would you ever properly correlate that if he only quickly checks a website at stations he never alights at, and then turns Wifi off?).
This is the "machine learning" rubbish all over again. Masses of data, lots of processing, no more insight into anything useful over and above monitoring ticket sales which you have to do anyway.
Not interesting, hard to do, hard to compete, lots of patent and licensing issues (you have to avoid ALL the well-known protocols, etc.) and never going to be compatible with other protocols because of the ever-shifting changes (e.g. MSN Messenger video - was documented, but nobody ever got it to work reliably for any length of time before it was changed)
It was a FSF priority for - what? a decade? - but if nobody bothers to shift focus, funding, effort and resources to it, nothing happens.
Same as almost all the FSF priorities, it's basically a made-up list of shit nobody wants to work on because there's zero incentive to, and FSF doesn't really help them out at all. Since the early days, just about every non-proprietary protocol has had poor audio and video support, as far back as people using MSN Messenger, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, Trillian, Pidgin, etc.
I gave up waiting after all that time of literally only having reliable text-message sending, and then Skype and things like Whatsapp just stepped in and took over in a matter of months when the smartphone era came about. These apps are about connecting to friends, and if your friends can't get your app going by just downloading and clicking your name, then they won't touch it. Without that people-network backing, the protocol / app / service is just dead in the water.
We could have won the whole industry, and become a household name at one point - the point where smartphones came out, running Android, and voice-, picture- and video- messaging were expensive. The WhatsApp era killed it off immediately. But you can't expect people to work for free, and hoping they'd just turn up and volunteer has resulted in precisely ZIP.
At one point, Jabber and XMPP was used by Google Talk. Those days are pretty dead, I think, and I reckon it was the same reason. "We have an IRC equivalent, that'll do". And then nobody works on the video/audio side, development stagnates and Google go their own way.
Ironic, given that in things like smartphone-connected CCTV systems, it's almost all Linux, and that's basically the same problem, just in one direction.
Nobody actually has any incentive to code on this stuff. The Flash replacement that was also "top priority" didn't even manage to make a name for itself before Flash itself was declared dead.
It's all very well saying "Why isn't there..." but if nobody at these big organisations steps up to organise, support, fund, resource, etc. the project then it's down to hobbyists, who generally all just pick up their smartphone and use a proprietary app.
Especially video-services. That needs a lot of high-bandwidth, low-latency server hardware in the middle, even if it's all encrypted. It's not just a case of writing a program where A talks to B.
Because they know that all it needs is one plugin, that replaces any web page you visit with a big "DOWNLOAD ANOTHER BROWSER" button that lets you grab Vivaldi, or Chrome/Chromium, or Firefox/IceWeasel, or whatever else.
It's recording your voice and video and sending to server which relays it to a third-party. That much is obvious, because that's what it's for.
If you mean "what ELSE is it doing on my computer", that's what permissions are for. It's literally not a worry if you have any semblance of a secure setup whatsoever.
If you mean "what ELSE are MS doing with the data except sending it to the person the other end", that's a question for Microsoft, data protection regulators, and server-operators.
But NONE of those questions are answered even if you had the complete 100% perfect source code to the Skype client sitting in your hands.
You've lost track of things if you think this is a good argument. To be honest, if I use a public XMPP server to a remote third-party, the situation is EXACTLY the same. I'm sending my voice and video to someone, with no clue who they are or what they're going to do with that data.
If you want perfect-forward-secrecy and off-the-record messaging with verified senders/receivers and everything encrypted in-between, you could advertise the encrypted data on a billboard in Times Square and it wouldn't matter. So certainly you could apply the same to using a closed-source piece of software if you were truly worried.
Those people worried about "what MS might do with my Skype data" wouldn't be using Skype as service if it came with $1000 and the source code written in BASIC so they could read it. Or they'd be using ANY service and applying proper principles to it.
As most Skype users don't/can't use OTR etc., they honestly don't care.
Against my wishes, I was asked to research biometric logins.
Pretty much every single stall that offered anything even remotely like that told me one thing (usually after much probing, or literally having to ask outright if it would work).
They don't work reliably enough for kids. Fingerprints. Iris scans. Face recognition. Every vendor told me the same thing, but they weren't actually ADVERTISING that (obviously). They said they would be good enough for, say, a library where people can just type in a name when it failed but for anything that needed a vague semblance of success, the kid would have to be at last 9/10/11.
As far as I was concerned, this was a welcome relief as I could honestly say that every vendor had said their products wouldn't be suitable for the product research I was asked to do. But it did make me wonder why they were there, still.
Apparently until they're "grown up", about 15/16, the chances of having to constantly re-register them are high and they had an awful lot of product returns etc. where people were using them with younger users.
In a way, a great thing. But I was also surprised that the tech was just that fragile.
In any civilised country, this stuff just renders the clause null and void if ever challenged, and potentially large tracts of surrounding legalese too.
"This does not affect your statutory rights" is an age-old and totally redundant piece of legalese. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights, whether they say it or not.
If the US are so daft as to allow "rights" to be signed away, they deserve everything they get from not challenging it from day one.
P.S. Extrapolate the consequences. If you can sign away a right, you can sign away "the right to remain silent". Not just be asked to talk, but actually REMOVE THE ABILITY for you to remain silent. The right to free speech. The right to a private life.
If you can sign away a right, any right, that right doesn't exist as a right, and likely none of the other things called that do either.
Slashdot Mirror
This annoys me.
Why not "backupandrecoverywhateveryouwant.dell.com" as the business-critical bit of it (hard-coded into software, etc.) and then if you REALLY need to, make
www.ridiculousdomainnamehere.com just resolve to that subdomain.
Then nobody is going to let dell.com expire (you would hope), if they do, the service will still work as expected and not be subject to compromise, and worse that happens if you have to tell customers to update their bookmarks if there was some user-focused web element on that domain (but, hey, without the secured login to the dell.com subdomain, it wouldn't matter right?).
Like the "Prince of Persia" code release, I'm not at all sure of the point of a release of assembler-heavy code.
Pretty much, you could get that from a disassembler just run on the same programs if you desperately needed to know what it did. Sure, legality and all, but is anyone really watching out for people reverse-engineering 20-year-old OS?
As someone who was familiar with 8086 asm and things like Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, I have written any number of things using exactly this kind of code. And I couldn't even be bothered to pick through the logic of even a single file out of interest.
Nice being GPL and all but are we going to see OpenMOS? I doubt it very much. It's like someone telling you a 100 year old recipe for bread. All very nice and all, but I bet it just tastes like shit and uses ingredients you can't get / don't want to use any more.
People who live in glass houses...
Flying explosive batteries moving into the path of oncoming traffic while trying to make contact with a moving car.
Yeah. Great idea. For a weapon.
If you honestly think that game "AI" is anywhere near the capabilities to operate in the real world, you're sadly mistaken. It literally does not act on a single sensor of input, input is handed to it. And even then I can recall many instances where game "AI" fucks up and can't do the simplest of things.
If you want to have the cars driving around a set loop of routes, highly specified, not able to deviate only choose at junctions, with zero unexpected obstacles - that's called a railway.
I'd be right behind an electric railway to every city with rentable places on the cars. We have it. Expanding it to every road is RIDICULOUSLY expensive.
But I'd rather train-then-walk than touch an self-driving car, and I'm someone who literally does everything they can to avoid having to take a train or bus.
This is all still the realms of hyperbole, and still doesn't resolve the fundamental incompatibility: Code which you can predict and certify to the point that you can guarantee people's lives, and code which tries to write itself or is "trained" by humans with no clue how it actually makes the decisions it does.
There is STILL no such thing as "AI", or even proper machine "learning". It's statistical-analysis-by-given-input or complete bollocks.
And it would be infinitely cheaper, easier and safer to just put a rail down one lane of every road and call it a tram.
"increasingly hard to defend"
Seems to me the defence is quite easy.
"We're going to do it properly and safely and with some kind of guarantee."
There's a big difference to saying "it can't be done" and saying "it's not at all practical/profitable to do".
So far, I don't think anything he's said can't be done. He breaks no laws of physics that I'm aware of.
But the expense to do so, and the advantages of doing do given back, don't match AT ALL. Batteries, electric cars, rockets, fancy trains - he can throw money at anything, of course. And you'll meet a modicum of success, of course. So long as you don't count "viable business model" under the criteria for success.
Tesla don't make profit. The batteries are industry standard designs that they tell us "will be cheaper in bulk". The rockets are basically a way to throw money away so far (but of course people will use them to launch their insured satellites, because you're the one losing money, they're just getting a cheap launch), and the trains thing - miles of tunnel sustaining vacuum indefinitely? Yeah, that stuff just happens and can be funded by a bit extra on a train ticket that consumers would pay to save a bit of time, of course it can..... Hey, have you met my friend Concorde?
People in the media aren't experts. If they were experts, they'd be working in those businesses. The experts, those working at places like NASA and Ford and similar competing companies... they're using Musk as a research guineau pig while they sit on 100 times the investment he could ever secure. They let him throw his money away on what doesn't work / isn't popular, and if he hits on anything they can take him out of the market in days. They don't often talk about him because they're quite happy to see him throw his money away on things that they probably would never bother to invest in.
But the second he's more than a celebrity throwing money into a large industrial-size bin, they can swoop and take his business in no time. Fact is, they're not, and they're not even bothering to compete, not because they can't but because there's little point. Tesla sell a pittance of cars compared to any car manufacturer you can name. Their rockets aren't stealing money from NASA, they're actually funding it. The trains thing is pure hyperbole at the moment and if people want faster trains, there's much more affordable middle-ground anywhere they want it. And the battery thing? It has no legs. It's literally "let's do what everyone else does, in bulk!". Except there are a number of companies already doing exactly that and Musk doesn't even have a factory for his yet.
The man is money and hyperbole. Nobody competing is going to bad-mouth him while that's true because the worst possible situation is: he does something interesting that captures the public's spending, and then they copy 100 times over. But all other situations are: he spends lots of money to make much less money, and all his claims end up never coming to fruition.
1) Who sets a sleep timer on something like that?
2) Who falls asleep with any music they can hear still playing?
3) Who feels they need to have the thing turn-off if they can sleep through it?
4) Who thinks a timer plug on the power would be quicker and easier?
5) Who thinks it's "fun" to have to hack on basic functionality to a device that obviously already detects the command necessary to activate it and contains technology sufficient to perform it but the tech makers just don't care enough to bother.
This is like Pointless Central.
I have a pack of AA 2800mAH rechargeable batteries at home that can give me something quite similar.
I bought them for my GP2X back in.... hold on... 2008, according to my emails from the person I bought it from. They will happily fry themselves if you short-circuit them, the current available is unbelievable.
They could fast-charge in a little over an hour, I think, but I never bought ridiculous chargers, I just bought more of those batteries. I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30 minutes back then too.
The charge time is about the only part I'm absolutely GUESSING on. The rest is something I could show you, and dig out the purchase emails for, with dates.
Sure, they may have got a tiny bit cheaper, and a tiny bit slimmer (but my currently mobile phone battery is at least the size of a single AA battery, and only 2.1Ah). But in the last ten years, the technology, capacity, size and charge times have barely changed.
Ten years is a long time in computing. In anything, we now enjoy the benefits of lower-powered computers (my GP2X needed 2 x high capacity AA's to run an ARM 200MHz), not better batteries.
To be honest... unless you're actually a scientist with access to a lab to create this stuff... it still "doesn't matter" until they are in shops, available to buy, just like everything else.
Until then, it's quite literally a science experiment.
It's like telling me that we have fusion-reactors. That's great. Cool science. The scientist in me loves the idea. But until someone actually BUYS ONE and puts it into the real world, it's entirely and literally academic. It doesn't affect my life, or almost anyone else's whatsoever.
You have to be a futures trader, or a research scientist for this kind of article to have any impact on you that wouldn't already happen if they just kept quiet and then brought out a product with it in.
So you're saying they're all show? I absolutely agree. That's the selling point?
"I don't want a car that looks like it'll crumple like a tin can in a wreck."
Right up until the day you understand physics, crumple-zones, NCAP safety tests, and the reason so many more people survive crashes nowadays.
"If "designer" status means that I get a luxury sedan that looks like a luxury sedan, I'll buy all day long."
Yep. Looks.
Believe it or not, most people DON'T buy a car based on looks, or we'd all have those ridiculous "sporty" things which are incredibly impractical and you can barely get into. I want a car that I can put the shopping in the back, five people in the seats, and still be able to park it easily without the thing costing the end of the Earth to buy or run.
(Hint: For reference, I drive one of these:
https://www.fordeumedia-e.ford... )
That's normal.
Humans often assume an approximately 28-hour cycle if removed from all natural stimuli.
Personally, I wake when I want and sleep when I'm tired, modulo work. That often means staying up all night only to go back to work, and then sleeping longer the next night etc. I don't see any reason to be bound to a particular timetable. If I didn't need to go to work, I would literally be completely unpredictable and live as much during the night as during the day.
To be honest, in the modern era is jet-lag even a thing? It's a disconnect between "visible daylight" and "time spent awake", and let's be honest - we're living more into the night now than we ever have in all of human history.
I don't know of anyone who suffers serious jetlag, because most of the ones who travel far are night-owls and easy-sleepers. I think that's got ten times more to do with things than anything you could take in pill-form or similar.
Myself, when I get off a plane, I'm just glad to be off it as I see the whole waiting/security/waiting/flying/more waiting/more security thing as an completely unnecessary chore. I'm usually bouncing out of the airport and barely sleep the first night (whenever that happens to be) because I'm just glad to be doing things.
Do you sleep on flights? Do you often sleep during the day? Can you stay up through the entire night without getting tired until the night after? Though I'm sure they are all linked to your body clock, you can pretty much train your body to anything, and I'm damn sure I've trained my body to totally ignore whether it's sunny out or not in order to sleep through the day and work through the night when required. And literally never had jetlag, even on trans-Atlantic flights.
Or:
Tesla make grandiose claims while trying to compete against huge, billion-dollar organisations that have been doing this for - in some cases - over 100 years, by throwing money at some things that have never been problems (e.g. actually making electric cars - the UK has had milk-floats, etc. since the 1960's and before, and essentially the underlying tech has "evolved" only by the components becoming available all the time before anyone thought of calling things electric cars, i.e. more efficient and larger motors), throwing money at things that are complete barriers to entry for models of car to the industry (batteries), throwing money at "innovations" that are nowhere near ready for production usage and basically can't even take responsibility for their own actions yet (self-driving nonsense), producing industry-standard, no-different, not-even-a-patent batteries in standard-size modules using standard techniques, and then thinking that just throwing things into the car suddenly makes it attractive to buyers as anything other than a status symbol.
It's literally like a child became a billionaire, said "I want electric cars" and then spends the next ten years throwing money at things that either already were, or that can't be without some innovation and people know it. Literally, name an INNOVATION on the part of Tesla. Something they invented. It's like someone went into a store, bought everything they found on the shelves, shoved it together and then claimed to be "innovative".
And they sell an ABSOLUTE PITTANCE of cars (and now even less than that!). They just make a lot of fuss about doing so. Any of the big names could buy them out in seconds, or buy up their components, or put out a competing model that would sell more just by having the big-name on it. If people actually wanted electric cars (they don't really, because of above problems).
About their only success or innovation is marketing, that's about it. Literally selling things that exist on the market already cobbled together. Their the market guinea pig. The big-names and letting them waste their money, while looking for the one decent breakthrough in their MASSIVE R&D labs that have 10 times as much money as Tesla ever had as a company.
Motor companies have always had electric concept cars (I would argue that hybrids are rest of the motor industry's innovation, nothing to do with Tesla - a middle ground more acceptable to the consumer which sell much better. Hybrids represent 3% of the market, electrics so much less than 1% that it's too hard to account for). Just nobody was ever really willing to buy them, so why would you bring them to market - the R&D was done, yes, but to ramp up to production is expensive and they'd never have been profitable, as Tesla are finding out now (have they ever made a penny in profit?). The same problem happened with the Tesla, really, except they sell on their "designer" status only, and not very well at all.
Any fool can throw money at a venture and claim success by selling a handful of vehicles at zero or negative profit. Hell, give me a few billion and I'll put a rocket on the Moon too. Problem is, it's not sustainable, sensible, doing anything for innovation, or actually driving anything at all..
Are you seriously suggesting the TfL, the people IN CHARGE OF THE TUBE NETWORK, can't come up with a number for how busy stations are at certain times of the day, but think that Wifi numbers (which by far do not represent actual passenger numbers) will help them do that?
Really? I mean, I knew they were incompetent, but that would just be staggering.
The control rooms can see cameras of almost every platform on almost every Tube station. They show it off when they do those documentaries where they cry about how little their drivers earn compared to millionaires and Premier League football players.
If you NEED to know the exact route every person took, to that level of detail, to know that Willesden Junction gets busy, then you really shouldn't be running a transport network. And, guess what. Those "bad connections"... yeah, that's when the train runs late which shows up on a big electronic sign on every station on the route. Gosh, I wonder how they could obtain that information....
Please explain why US Navy warhsips have crews who "lack basic seamanship certification".
I mean.. I understand that they might not have the piece of paper, the same way they might not have passed the official driving test to drive a tank, but surely... surely at some point... someone gave them the equivalent skills and/or sent them on the same kinds of training such that it would be a cinch to acquire such certification?
Good luck. I've looked for a "real news" site for years that actually lets you filter this kind of thing out.
If I want news, I go on a news site.
If I want tech news, I go on a tech news site.
Unfortunately, "number of eyeballs" always wins and they all creep into current affairs, actions of presidents of countries that I have little interest in, and terrorist attacks etc. as well as the soapboxing of any vaguely relevant celebrity (Musk, etc.).
Personally, I want a news search engine that lets me filter:
-terrorism ... ...
-ISIS
-Trump
-Brexit
-Musk
All the ones I see end up with either junk creeping through or such sparse pages after you do that that it's just not worth it.
Like the TV show The Newsroom: I'd really like it to exist in real life, a channel that only reports REAL NEWS and not the tripe, but while "what's popular" dictates revenue, you don't stand a chance.
Paranoia much?
Pretty much if you're on a train (especially a Tube train) then you bought a ticket from A to B or - in London - you bought an Oyster card which records your every journey as you have to tap-in and tap-out.
This is quite normal for any train/subway system. What information do you think they are going to glean from Wifi that they can't glean in this manner about travel patterns? Only what you give them, and only of little use (does it REALLY matter that the guy going from Embankment to Mile End did a DNS lookup for slashdot.org, and how on earth would you ever properly correlate that if he only quickly checks a website at stations he never alights at, and then turns Wifi off?).
This is the "machine learning" rubbish all over again. Masses of data, lots of processing, no more insight into anything useful over and above monitoring ticket sales which you have to do anyway.
Not interesting, hard to do, hard to compete, lots of patent and licensing issues (you have to avoid ALL the well-known protocols, etc.) and never going to be compatible with other protocols because of the ever-shifting changes (e.g. MSN Messenger video - was documented, but nobody ever got it to work reliably for any length of time before it was changed)
It was a FSF priority for - what? a decade? - but if nobody bothers to shift focus, funding, effort and resources to it, nothing happens.
Same as almost all the FSF priorities, it's basically a made-up list of shit nobody wants to work on because there's zero incentive to, and FSF doesn't really help them out at all. Since the early days, just about every non-proprietary protocol has had poor audio and video support, as far back as people using MSN Messenger, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, Trillian, Pidgin, etc.
I gave up waiting after all that time of literally only having reliable text-message sending, and then Skype and things like Whatsapp just stepped in and took over in a matter of months when the smartphone era came about. These apps are about connecting to friends, and if your friends can't get your app going by just downloading and clicking your name, then they won't touch it. Without that people-network backing, the protocol / app / service is just dead in the water.
We could have won the whole industry, and become a household name at one point - the point where smartphones came out, running Android, and voice-, picture- and video- messaging were expensive. The WhatsApp era killed it off immediately. But you can't expect people to work for free, and hoping they'd just turn up and volunteer has resulted in precisely ZIP.
At one point, Jabber and XMPP was used by Google Talk. Those days are pretty dead, I think, and I reckon it was the same reason. "We have an IRC equivalent, that'll do". And then nobody works on the video/audio side, development stagnates and Google go their own way.
Ironic, given that in things like smartphone-connected CCTV systems, it's almost all Linux, and that's basically the same problem, just in one direction.
Nobody actually has any incentive to code on this stuff. The Flash replacement that was also "top priority" didn't even manage to make a name for itself before Flash itself was declared dead.
It's all very well saying "Why isn't there..." but if nobody at these big organisations steps up to organise, support, fund, resource, etc. the project then it's down to hobbyists, who generally all just pick up their smartphone and use a proprietary app.
Especially video-services. That needs a lot of high-bandwidth, low-latency server hardware in the middle, even if it's all encrypted. It's not just a case of writing a program where A talks to B.
Because they know that all it needs is one plugin, that replaces any web page you visit with a big "DOWNLOAD ANOTHER BROWSER" button that lets you grab Vivaldi, or Chrome/Chromium, or Firefox/IceWeasel, or whatever else.
It's recording your voice and video and sending to server which relays it to a third-party. That much is obvious, because that's what it's for.
If you mean "what ELSE is it doing on my computer", that's what permissions are for. It's literally not a worry if you have any semblance of a secure setup whatsoever.
If you mean "what ELSE are MS doing with the data except sending it to the person the other end", that's a question for Microsoft, data protection regulators, and server-operators.
But NONE of those questions are answered even if you had the complete 100% perfect source code to the Skype client sitting in your hands.
You've lost track of things if you think this is a good argument. To be honest, if I use a public XMPP server to a remote third-party, the situation is EXACTLY the same. I'm sending my voice and video to someone, with no clue who they are or what they're going to do with that data.
If you want perfect-forward-secrecy and off-the-record messaging with verified senders/receivers and everything encrypted in-between, you could advertise the encrypted data on a billboard in Times Square and it wouldn't matter. So certainly you could apply the same to using a closed-source piece of software if you were truly worried.
Those people worried about "what MS might do with my Skype data" wouldn't be using Skype as service if it came with $1000 and the source code written in BASIC so they could read it. Or they'd be using ANY service and applying proper principles to it.
As most Skype users don't/can't use OTR etc., they honestly don't care.
I went to a trade fair, for IT in schools.
Against my wishes, I was asked to research biometric logins.
Pretty much every single stall that offered anything even remotely like that told me one thing (usually after much probing, or literally having to ask outright if it would work).
They don't work reliably enough for kids. Fingerprints. Iris scans. Face recognition. Every vendor told me the same thing, but they weren't actually ADVERTISING that (obviously). They said they would be good enough for, say, a library where people can just type in a name when it failed but for anything that needed a vague semblance of success, the kid would have to be at last 9/10/11.
As far as I was concerned, this was a welcome relief as I could honestly say that every vendor had said their products wouldn't be suitable for the product research I was asked to do. But it did make me wonder why they were there, still.
Apparently until they're "grown up", about 15/16, the chances of having to constantly re-register them are high and they had an awful lot of product returns etc. where people were using them with younger users.
In a way, a great thing. But I was also surprised that the tech was just that fragile.
Repeat after me:
You can't sign away a right.
If you can, it was never a right.
In any civilised country, this stuff just renders the clause null and void if ever challenged, and potentially large tracts of surrounding legalese too.
"This does not affect your statutory rights" is an age-old and totally redundant piece of legalese. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights, whether they say it or not.
If the US are so daft as to allow "rights" to be signed away, they deserve everything they get from not challenging it from day one.
P.S. Extrapolate the consequences. If you can sign away a right, you can sign away "the right to remain silent". Not just be asked to talk, but actually REMOVE THE ABILITY for you to remain silent. The right to free speech. The right to a private life.
If you can sign away a right, any right, that right doesn't exist as a right, and likely none of the other things called that do either.
Ah, nothing like a techy news site trying to stifle the news of their public techy failures.
They should just ask DICE to run them for them. That'll take them down rather quickly.
Sourceforge and Slashdot have been doing the old "front-page-only" trick for a few days in a row now.
You made TheRegister too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
But not a mention on here?